Exchange UM Auto Attendant Won’t Play My Greeting

One of our offices has almost no need for an Auto Attendant, certainly not an IVR. So we put together a recording that basically says what the default Exchange UM greeting says – “Thank you for calling our company. Please say the name of the party you are trying to reach”. That’s it.

So I went to Exchange UM, copied the file into the “Business hours main menu prompt” field and began testing by dialing the extension from my Lync client.

Exchange UM refused to play the file. It always played the default Exchange recording (“To reach a specific person, just tell me the name.”). I thought maybe something was wrong with my file so I used a known-good recording from one of our other Auto-Attendants. Still no change.

I restarted the Exchange UM service. Still nothing. What the?

So I started Googling and found nothing other than the Technet page.

Perusing the article I came across this little tidbit:

No default business hours main menu prompt will be played until you configure key mappings on the auto attendant.

What the? Why? Why would you possibly require this?

So my workaround was to set key mapping 9 to forward back to the main Auto Attendant number. What a time-waster this “feature” is…

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